Thoughts and suggestions from the Library staff at Tri-County Technical College, Pendleton, SC.

Friday, October 4, 2013

History, the Government, and our legal documents

This blog post is not to debate the current issue of
the US government shutdown and its various political maceration's.Rather it is to give you the tools to help
define your ideas and how you feel about the current state of events.The Library at TCTC is fortunate enough to
have a number of databases and documents that should help you in this process.Start first at our page that is dedicated to
History which is http://library.tctc.edu/history.Look under the tab American History and you
will find these resources (and more).

U.S. History in Context
The premier source for American history: provides access to 4,000 primary
source documents, as well as journal articles covering themes, events,
individuals, and periods in U.S. history.

Milestone Documents in American History
Included in the Salem History database. Provides full text of the most
important documents in American history, e.g. Monroe Doctrine, Gettysburg
Address, Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor Speech, Marshall Plan, Bybee Torture Memo,
etc. An extensive analysis and historical overview are provided for each
document.

Major Acts of Congress
Examines landmark pieces of legislation, explaining factors that led to their
adoption and their impact on American life.

One of the rumors and
status messages currently going around is that the Affordable Healthcare Act
will violate the 28th amendment.If you are an observer of American history, you would know we have NO 28th
amendment.However, consider that you
are not up on the Constitution and the various amendments.All of the above databases could help you
discover the answer to this question: What do the amendments to the
Constitution say? How are amendments added to the Constitution?

The means by which an alteration to the U.S. Constitution,
whether a modification, deletion, or addition, is accomplished.

Article V of the U.S. Constitution establishes the means
for amending that document according to a two-step procedure: proposal of
amendments, followed by ratification. Amendments may be proposed in two ways:
by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress or by a special convention
summoned by Congress on the petition of two-thirds (34) of the state
legislatures.

In the long history of the U.S. Constitution, over 5,000
amendments have been introduced in Congress. Only 33 of these have been
formally proposed by Congress, and none has ever been proposed by a special
convention.

No matter which method is used for the proposal of a
constitutional amendment, Congress retains the power to decide what method will
be used for ratification: approval of three-fourths (38) of the state
legislatures, or approval of three-fourths (38) of special state conventions.
Congress may also place other restrictions, such as a limited time frame, on
ratification.

Of the 33 amendments proposed by Congress, 27 were
ratified. Of the amendments ratified, only one—the TWENTY-FIRST AMENDMENT,
which repealed a PROHIBITION on alcohol—was ratified by the state
convention method. The rest have been ratified by three-fourths of the state
legislatures.

The process for amending the Constitution is deliberately
difficult. Even when an amendment is proposed by Congress, it has taken, on
average, two-and-a-half years for it to be ratified. That difficulty creates
stability, with its accompanying advantages and disadvantages. The advantages
lie in the fact that the Constitution's provisions are not subject to change
according to the whims of a particular moment. The disadvantages inhere in the
reality that the Constitution must also adapt and be relevant to a changing
society. Given the difficulty of amendment, much of the burden of adapting the
Constitution to a changing world has fallen on the shoulders of the Supreme
Court and its powers of JUDICIAL REVIEW, which have been described as an
informal method of changing the Constitution. However, constitutional
amendments may in turn modify or overturn judicial opinion, as was the case
with the Eleventh, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Sixteenth, Nineteenth,
Twenty-fourth, and Twenty-sixth Amendments.